Monthly Archives: February, 2015

Harvard University has been running an open-access repository for many years. It’s called DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard).

Today they’re launching Your Story Matters, a collection of many hundreds of short testimonials of how free access to Harvard researchers’ publications has helped state legislators, TV producers, community-college lecturers, preachers, high-school teachers, parents of autistic children, dieticians and many, many others do their jobs more efficiently and more effectively.

These stories volunteered by the users of our open-access repository are the best evidence that OA serves real people with real needs, that OA meets unmet demand, that the demand unmet by conventional journals includes academic and non-academic readers.

It’s great that this site is now online, helping us to appreciate some of the vast opportunity cost of keeping research locked behind paywalls.